Frazz by Jef Mallett for October 17, 2024

The classic Econ joke: A leading economist goes to visit his alma mater and sees that his old professor is still teaching.

“Wow. I see you’re still giving the same test.”

Yes. But now the answers are different."

Economics suffer from shifting sands of reality.

And of politics, which is about as far removed from reality as one can get. Frazz is suggesting ‘deep waters’ ahead.

Ought is ethics not econ

With, without. And who’ll deny it’s what the fighting’s all about? ~ ‘Us and Them’, Pink Floyd

“Money doesn’t talk. It swears.” – Dylan

I would say the second field is ethics. Economics studies what people do. Ethics studies what they ought to do instead.

Positive economics is about who gets what. The other is normative economics’

Frazz was not paying attention in class. The first thing we teach in Principles of Economics is the three big questions: What to produce? How to produce it? and Who gets it? He remembers only the third one.

Supply and Demand – those who hold the supply hostage have made their demands

I keep hoping this ‘strip’ will make me laugh

That other field is called political economics, and it was much of what economics was about (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, J.S. Mill) until the late 19th century. Remember that Adam Smith was a professor of moral philosophy. It was W. Stanley Jevons in the 1890s who proposed stripping the “political” part out of the name of the field and taking moral questions out of economic thinking. Now, political economics is mostly taught in political science and sociology.

On an unrelated subject, I had a Frazz moment this morning. I was walking in our park and saw a whole crowd of cyclists, in brightly colored jackets and helmets, all pedaling out of the parking lot and up the road.

@ Brittanica dot com

In full: Harold Dwight Lasswell (the father of political science)

Born: February 13, 1902, Donnellson, Illinois, U.S. Died: December 18, 1978, New York, New York (aged 76)

Notable Works: “Politics: Who Gets What, When, How” “Power and Personality” “Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry”

Subjects Of Study: personality, political power

First words out of prof’s mouth on first day of Econ 101: “Demand is infinite; supply is finite; all else is commentary.”

(No comma after complex. Former copyeditor here.)

From economics to ethics.